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The D.C. Desk Dispatches an Envoy to Podcastistan. Plus: Jesse Armstrong, Matthew Goode, Elizabeth Banks, Mel Giedroyc & More....
Dear Wags,
One of the little perks of growing up is seeing the culture tilt away from you. You are no longer its overriding obsession. How you wear your hair or whatever music you listen to no longer drives traffic. You no longer obsess over glamorous people you do not wish to meet and instinctively dislike.
This is rich coming from us, but becoming too immersed in popular culture warps the perspective—you can’t see something clearly if you are subsumed in it. When you grow more alienated from what's trending, you get to fly over the pockmarked landscape and bask in annoyance at its tattiness and stupidity.
Still, one has to be careful about this. Nobody wants to become another crank with creepy eyebrows and a smelly tweed coat (we’d say “Andy Rooney,” but that would date us). Crankiness goes a long way in understanding revanchist culture critics. Mass culture was not designed for them. Among other things, it embodies a permissiveness they despise. You don’t need to grow a beard and join Opus Dei to understand that there is a fellowship, even a perverse joy, in shared revulsion.
The motivating animus of MAGA isn’t immigration, economics, or foreign policy. It is vividly cultural. Nearly everything the Trump movement does—the capture of Lincoln Center, the war on Harvard, the animalistic glee it gets from taking cheap shots at soft targets—is driven by hunger to remake culture in its image. Having designated the culture war as the only war that matters, they are having some success.
It helps that their old opponents on the cultural front—Hollywood, the campuses, establishment media—have never been weaker. Right under our noses, America has undergone a massive cultural shift. The fragmentation of popular culture—from something shared by millions, with identifiable stars and common reference points, to something so diffuse it could be called individualized—took place in just a handful of years. We still have movies, television, book publishers, and traditional journalism, though they’ve all lost ground. Progressives still have potent messengers, Bruce Springsteen among them. But in the aggregate, they matter far less to consumers than the bespoke media they swim in continuously.
This is true across generational lines. People entertain themselves more variously than ever; they rarely gather en masse in the old media venues. This has terminally weakened the authority of platforms that, for generations, were a source of power for the establishment left (authentic leftists, of which America has few, would object). The information ecosystem has changed in ways that advantage right-wing culture warriors, and they are reaping the benefits.
William F. Buckley, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, and Andrew Breitbart all understood the importance of the mainstream information ecosystem because they were so alienated from it. Each contributed to a dense, well-funded, and vibrant parallel universe—the conservative counterculture—that produced its very own stars. As a subculture, it has always been driven by disgust with a cartooned cultural elite. It has been helped along by the Democratic Party’s enmeshment with Hollywood. Especially since Watergate, it has been focused like a laser on liberal bias in establishment journalism.
Liberals enjoy certain advantages in the traditional media ecosystem; conservatives have flourished in a more undisciplined world that has rapidly evolved from idea journals to talk radio, from talk radio to blogs, from blogs to podcasting, from podcasts to YouTube. As Americans have drifted away from old media, Democrats have discovered that they are at a critical disadvantage. They may dominate trusted institutions, but these institutions matter far less.
Institutions still matter—or Republicans would hardly spend so much time trying to gut them. But the digital revolution and changes in consumer habits accelerated by the pandemic remade the landscape. A large number of Americans no longer consume anything that resembles traditional news. Nor are they much interested in Hollywood or its old avatars. In elections, the people who care most about such things already tend to be Democrats. It’s the fast-growing market segments that contain everybody else the center-left needs to worry about.
Defeated political parties will spend a little time fighting the last war. Democrats are now thrashing about, trying to understand how the culture wriggled away from them. In the 2024 presidential election, the party lost ground with a stomach-churning array of constituencies—younger voters (men under 30 shifted to Trump by a 16-point margin), males of all races, Latinos, Asian Americans, and residents of the industrial Midwest. That earthquake has donors and operatives chasing loopy brainstorms. One of them includes the much-ridiculed $20 million S.A.M. initiative (Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan).
For hustlers peddling fix-it schemes to Democrats, this must be some kind of golden age. Stories about rich donors hunting for “our Joe Rogan” are poignant because the impulse is so reactionary. The absurdities begin with the idea that podcasters such as Rogan, Theo Von, and Andrew Schulz, who command huge audiences, ever belonged to the Republicans. They do not. Quibble all you want, but they appeal to young men in particular because they are not partisan in the expected ways.
If you cannot see the cultural shift—perhaps because you are too immersed in older patterns—it’s convenient to read 2024 as a simple rejection of a political style, as opposed to something far more profound. During the pandemic, large numbers of Americans embraced podcasts as a primary diversion. They were stuck at home, and the comedians who kibbitzed in their ears became new buddies. Several prominent podcasters became leaders of a new, heterodox or post-consensus discourse—like the rabble-rousers in New York coffeehouses in the 1770s, like the founders of influential little magazines of the 20th century, and like the progenitors of cable news a little later on. They are originators of a new, loose media form, which does not center politics, but threads it into an attitude of skepticism toward the establishment and its shibboleths.
There have always been talking heads on the left and right. But the old Breitbartian presumption that politics is downstream from culture has been scrambled—this is popular culture with a few political attitudes suffused within it. It lives alongside dick jokes, conspiracy theories, and ice plunges. It is not, in any meaningful sense, “conservative”—at least not in the family-values, tax-cutting, hawkish mold perfected by Ronald Reagan. It has far more in common with Howard Stern 1.0 than with Limbaugh. And as such, it is entirely too early to assume it’s the foundation of a durable Republican coalition—especially now that the GOP holds the reins of power and Fox News has become a kind of state media.
Still, this mode of discourse has driven a stake through the heart of regular programming. It doesn’t cling to legacy entertainment—and often mocks celebrity virtue-signaling—but it’s tightly linked to gaming, sports, and other stereotypical guy stuff. Its relationship to the official storyline is one of instinctive defiance.
The rise of this culture puts traditional Democratic politicians at a disadvantage. Quite understandably, Kamala Harris didn’t make time to sit in Austin blowing smoke with Rogan—there’s a glaring mismatch of sensibilities (she did brave Call Her Daddy). Still, progressive figures (Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders) have logged time in this arena and done just fine. These long-form chats aren’t journalistic or confrontational by nature, and the most popular podcasters aren’t hostile to Democratic policies so much as to the censoriousness they associate with the left. Success doesn’t mean aping the rising culture, but in a space that prizes looseness and informality, politicians do need to show up as human beings: unfiltered, unscripted, willing to screw up. Talking points don’t survive a three-hour podcast.
The ascendant culture is anti-establishment, befitting a churlish national mood. The official narrative—the ribbon on your tuxedo at an awards show, Taylor Swift’s endorsement, Michael Lewis’s cogent defense of the federal government, the evident goodness of measles vaccinations—is tired. Like previous iterations of popular culture, this one is frequently idiotic and crass. Still, you cannot save democracy if you are spooked by the demos.
As always, much of what the demos belches up is distasteful. But if Democrats are now out of cultural as well as political power, they might take a few notes from their enemies about how to engage a restive public. Already, many of the podcasters who once flirted with Trump are raising objections to his policies. They are unlikely allies on matters like tax cuts for billionaires, the suspension of habeas corpus, or the banning of abortion and pornography. Trumpism—especially without Trump—will be a tough sell if this audience is given a plausible alternative.
That alternative ought to begin with a recognition that culture has tilted in a new direction—into territory unfamiliar to many politicians, speaking a coarse but common language, unmoored from long-held assumptions. There’s every possibility this culture will nurture political impulses that transcend, or even render irrelevant, the partisan binary as we've long known it.
Conservatives spent decades building an alternative media infrastructure that supports their movement. Liberals, instead, prevailed in mainstream forums that have been progressively eroded. But if they are serious about reading the new culture that has grown up in the breach—and reaching the millions who will never read The New York Times or egghead newsletters like this one—they would do well to get comfortable meeting most people where they are, right now.
Any party serious about renewal must reckon with realignment—or be steamrolled by it. After all, growing up means being clear-eyed about the culture as it is—not just carping about how you wish it would be.
Yours Ever,
M.V. Fenwick
Move Fast, Break Everything Beyond Repair
Mountainhead (HBO/Max). Wag Supremo Jesse Armstrong knows how to skewer the ruling class. Succession sent up the greed and ineptitude of an old-media dynasty. Now he’s back with a feature-length takedown of the tech broligarchy.
Meet the jerks: Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a Musk-like social media tycoon whose AI upgrades are about to send the world down the tubes; Randall (Steve Carell), a Marc Andreessen–Peter Thiel hybrid and éminence grise in libertarian denial about his mortality; Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the snide conscience of the group, who’s developed a filter to sort real content from fake—though not exactly for noble reasons; and Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), nicknamed “Soup Kitchen” because he’s only a hundred-millionaire, clinging to the hope that his cheesy meditation app will make him whole.
The crew gathers at Mountainhead, Hugo’s sprawling alpine compound and limp tribute to objectivism. (“Is that like The Fountainhead?” one guest quips. “Your interior designer is Ayn Bland?”) Things go sideways when news alerts start streaming in from the rest of the planet, now tearing itself apart thanks to their innovations. Naturally, these jokers think they can hack their way out of it—are they not the most brilliant entrepreneurs in history? More urgently, they’re locked in endless rounds of bitchy one-upmanship, each desperate to prove he’s the master of all masters of the universe.
Starting with The Thick of It, which eviscerated the British government under New Labour, Armstrong has made a career out of turning terrible people into comedy gold. The characters here richly deserve the roasting they get. So do their inspirations.
—Andreas Wolf
A Wee Thriller
Dept. Q (Netflix). Smarties Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) and Chandni Lakhani adapt Jussi Adler-Olsen’s bestselling Danish crime novels, relocating the action from Scandinavia to Edinburgh. There, a morose detective named Carl Morck (Matthew Goode, lightly rumpled) is consigned to a basement cold case unit after his hubris gets a fellow officer killed.
In Scotland, Morck becomes one of those impossible, brilliant detectives Britain never seems to run out of. Aiding him in solving the disappearance of a woman (Chloe Pirrie) are his hospital-bound former partner (James Sives), a fragile cadet (Leah Byrne), and a Syrian refugee (Alexej Manvelov). Mark Bonnar and Kate Dickie glower effectively as the brass, while Kelly Macdonald plays Morck’s department-mandated therapist, with infinite patience and steel. In a field crowded with U.K. procedurals, Dept. Q is a suitably mossy, murky, and harrowing addition.
— Isabel Dalhousie
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